


with a love i seemed to lose

by talkinclockwork



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hopeful Ending, M/M, My First Work in This Fandom, Platonic Soulmates, Soulmates, Spoilers, Violence, altair would totally love gandhi once he grew up a little malik is always right, but if you get through the eight pages of nonsense to get there you're a saint anyway, character death A LOT, it's kind of schmoopy actually, malik disapproves of all of altair's life choices, multiple au's, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:40:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talkinclockwork/pseuds/talkinclockwork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find each other in every life, the destructive orbit of stars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with a love i seemed to lose

**Author's Note:**

> AKA: That one where Altaïr and Malik are soulmates and Malik will always disapprove of Altaïr’s life choices. Also known as the one where I hadn’t written anything for fun in over a year, I saw the words “athletic librarian”, and the writing portion of my brain promptly went into a series of rusty, screaming spasms that spit words on a conveniently open document that may or may not have originally been intended for a school assignment. Oops. (I am so out of practice, it’s shameful.)
> 
> The title comes from the poem "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..." by Elizabeth Barrett

In one world, Malik is imprisoned for two years in a dungeon at the behest of a man who despises Altaïr. He dies alone, forced to his knees in the dirt with his proud, stiff back curved forward under the strength of those who he would call Brother. He dies grinning a bared set of teeth, eyes full of fire, unafraid, even as his head hits the ground and his body twitches, twitches, dies.

He dies and his body is desecrated, because he was Altaïr’s best friend, and because his loyalty would never sway.

Altaïr did not save him, but he killed the one who killed him, and that had to be enough.

In one world, Malik dies and Altaïr lives. But this is only one way to tell a story.

It isn’t always the best, but it isn’t always the worst.

\---

_“Nine lives in exchange for mine,” Altaïr says._

_“And the Apple,” Al Mualim agrees, sharper than necessary with the results of his punishment of Altaïr’s failure still dripping red down his student’s front, curving around an eye._

_Altaïr nods silently and bows, like it doesn’t pull at barely sealed wounds. Like it doesn’t hurt._

“Malik,” Altaïr says before he can stop himself, his grip on his short blade dangerously close to loosening.

This time, Malik didn’t come back with the Apple. This time, Malik didn’t come back at all, and the part he lost alongside Kadar was not his arm.

Malik stands at the end of the hall, lips curled up to show the barest sketches of teeth with a sword clutched in one hand. Dust swirls in the sunshine around his feet from where he’d dropped from the rafters, silent and swift in a way Altaïr hadn’t been expecting. The Assassins in Jerusalem gave him a wide berth.

“You still live?” was Malik’s reply, more teeth showing. “Ach. But I should not be surprised. You, who are Al Mualim’s golden pupil, of course he would not punish you as you deserve, not even when you _murder_ another of your Brothers in your _arrogance_.”

“Malik-” Altaïr says again, stupidly, the wounds of hurt and guilt tearing afresh muddling his thoughts, even as relief makes him breathless; and this time his hold on his blade does slip as he takes a small step forward. “Please, Brother, we thought-” It is the wrong thing to say, in every life.

“I am _not your brother!_ ” Malik shouts, raw and pained like he never is otherwise, and he moves and too late Altaïr stops noticing only _Malik_ and sees the cross of red on his chest beneath the silver flash of sharp-edged metal. “My brother is _dead_ because of you!”

One of them always dies here and sometimes it’s even him (when his thoughts are blacker and he can’t bring himself to lift his blade against the one man who has all the right in the world to kill him), but those words never stop haunting him. Not in any life.

\---

Then there are the times when nothing starts out the same. There is one, when Altaïr is stolen as a baby. He grows up without knowing Al Mualim or the Creed, and when he is present in Solomon’s Temple it is at Robert de Sable’s side.

He is the one who notices the creep of the Assassins above their heads, where otherwise they might have made it out alive to fetch help – something that cannot be allowed. He is the one who gives chase, born and bred to hunt like a cat, a talent not wasted in the Order. One dies quickly, but that the second survives for as long as he does is only because of the third’s assistance.

He notices this, plans for it, and though he’s prepared for the retaliation when he finally manages to separate them, he doesn’t expect the ferocity of the attack.

The Assassin who comes tearing out of the darkness isn’t just red anymore. He _burns_. He is blinding. It is only because Altaïr never lost sight of him in the shadows that he brings his own sword up in time to parry, and the shock of the blow sings up his arms and aches in his wrists.

Altaïr is surprised.

And then he _grins_.

(“What is your name?” he asks, pinning the Assassin, finally, beneath him. He isn’t lenient with his hold, even with blood bubbling up between his opponent’s lips, a caution not undeserved as his quarry twists with a frightening strength seemed possessed only by the dying and spits in his face.

And if anything about this seems _wrong_ when Altaïr shrugs and finishes the job with a quick jerk of his sword between the Assassin’s ribs, if something inside him screams that _this is not right_ , it is not something Altaïr can tell. The Assassin is still only a stranger, if one who can fight well; an enemy to the Order. In the end, not important, and quickly forgotten.

“ _Kadar_ ,” he dies saying, weakly, “ _Kadar_ ,” but he calls it out into the darkness and Altaïr knows it is not the answer he sought.)

\---

But these are the lives where he dies at the end of Altaïr’s blade, and are vastly preferable to the ones where he dies at another’s.

There is a fruit vendor in one life, in a land not quite their usual home, who scowls at Altaïr every time he sees him, ever since Altaïr had knocked the man’s brother over in a hasty dash to avoid the guards. He somehow finds out Altaïr favors apples and manages to never have any for sale whenever Altaïr is in the area. Then the city goes to war with itself. His body is only uncovered in the aftermath.

In another his identichip cuts grooves into Altaïr’s palm, and when their superior asks all those at the scene of the downed (tampered with, broken, _sabotaged_ ) spacecruiser if anyone had been able to uncover it from his suit – the family wants them, you understand, the brother… – he finds himself shaking his head and denying everything as his fingers curl tighter in his pocket.

More times than he is ever comfortable with, it’s Kadar himself who stumbles in with blank eyes and bloody hands, and Altaïr alternates the rest of his life between hating Kadar with more in him than he ever thought possible, and dragging the boy into his side to let him bow his head and shake. The worst is when he doesn't care at all.

There are times when it’s illness or heat, cold or starvation. A huddled skeleton with skin in the cell beside him, a feverish hand grasping his until it doesn’t anymore, or a sick man glaring at him weakly through hazy eyes, more strength than he’s shown in days, telling him to go the market for something that wasn’t _broth_ ; stop _coddling_ him, damn it, just _go_ – and realizing too late in his relief that it was Malik’s brand of kindness and he should have _known_. There are dogs and large cats and frightened prey, ragged groups of men with spears and soldiers with guns. There are bleeding wounds and punctured stomachs, lungs, where the only thing he can do is sit at Malik’s side and watch him die. Or leave, because he can’t bear to, and he hates himself in those lives more than in any other.

Sometimes he eases Malik into it the way he should, the way Malik deserves, and it’s the only life where his hands don’t feel quite so dirty afterward.

He still prefers it when it’s Malik’s turn to kill him, and if that makes him selfish – well, it’s not as if anyone will ever know.

\---

Their lives are always bloody, if not literally then metaphorically. At his core, Malik is a fighter. He carries violence in the marrow of his bones, in every body he has ever worn; and in every life, when he smiles, it is a show of fangs. He has been everything from a doctor to a writer to an engineer. He is ruthlessly skilled at all of them, and no matter what kind of life he leads he always hits _hard_. Altaïr is always the best at whatever he does, but he is never quite as good at any of these things as he is at killing.

It’s a rare life where his hands come away clean, and rarer that Malik is not dogging his steps in his own way, flitting around the outskirts of his life or standing right in his face or at his shoulder, or sometimes both at the same time.

They travel through Stargates and Altaïr is in a constant competition with the science staff to keep them from stealing his fellow soldier away from him. He plops down in a store for want of anything better to do, recently back from a tour and still adapting, and Malik glances at him over his glasses and makes a face at the way he holds his book. He sells coffee, in one life, with plans to kill a foreign dignitary in a week, and Malik storms in cursing incompetent interns and indecisive clients and never actually leaves.

He’s surprisingly good with maps, no matter where or how they meet. It’s one of the constants, like the violence, like Kadar. But Malik has always had a map-mind, rigid and logical in one way, a mess of symbols that make no sense to anyone but him in another, gathered in with odd turns of streets and annoyingly cramped writing.

These are the lives where they find each other. These are the lives where they stay.

The ones where they don’t, where they meet without meeting – where they pass on the street and fail to trip or step out in front of a car or are just the slightest bit too absorbed in what they are doing to catch the other’s eye – those are worlds that do not bear thinking about. Worlds where Altaïr never learns or learns too late; worlds where Malik loses and loses and never gets the chance to gain.

\---

They are nine and the world ends.

They grow up together, circling like dogs, faces turned outward against all threats. The buildings that rise gray-and-glass out of the sands are tall enough to avoid the worst of the monsters (both infected and human). They learn to run and leap between them, to use their splintered reflections to their best advantage to befuddle and lose; they learn to survive in pieces, trial and error that is never fatal only because one of them tends to know better at just the right moment.

Half the scars Altaïr gains before he’s good enough to avoid them come from Malik, because it’s better to be hurt by someone who won’t _kill_ you than find out too late what you can’t handle at the hands of someone who _will_.

They grow up with no other plans but surviving, this day and the next, until they find a lone human, frightened and younger than them, and even though Altaïr frowns Malik is already insisting he come with them. And that is how it starts. (In every life, Malik has a Kadar.)

Soon there is another, and another, and even sooner there are walls and careful fortifications and defensive strategies Malik tends to throw at Altaïr for his opinions just so he can tell him what a fool he is and use them anyway. Malik enjoys bossing people around, which isn’t something that surprises Altaïr, but he is surprised at how _good_ he is at it. Malik, in turn, is surprised Altaïr manages anything as basic as not killing anyone. (Truth: He is surprised Altaïr stays, he is surprised at how easily Altaïr fills the role of a leader, he is surprised when Altaïr clambers out of the sands after a week missing and says, blunt against Malik’s hissing, “Hurry up and gather the others. I have found a place for us to settle.”)

It is hard and brutal, and for the first several years their rules are strict, unyielding, and brutally enforced until people start settling down and stop looking at each other like enemies just a blade away from murder. (And it is murder, again. There is a name for it, again.) And it is something _good_.

(They are nine, the revolution fails, and the world does not end. They grow up circling each other like dogs and the world learns to _fear_ them.)

\---

They grow up together as often as they do apart, and they are always stronger for it, but it’s the lives they grow old together, when neither of them dies too young, that are rare. Regimes fall and rise and the world _changes_ when they are together long enough, either as enemies or allies or friends.

This is probably why they are allowed to do so only rarely.

\---

In some lives they hate each other, in some they love, and in some they can’t decide which they want. It changes little, whatever they end up being to each other, and it rarely matters which path they follow from one life to the next. It is only an extension of what they already had from the start.

Many times, Altaïr finds Maria, finds Sef and Darim and Tazim and all those he loves, in one form or another. Sometimes they even manage to all find each other, against all the odds, and those lives are always special. He is a father and a husband, a mother and a sister so many times and this is _right_. But these are not certainties, these are not vital.

Always his heart beats a desperate staccato rhythm of _Malik Malik Malik_ against his ribcage, a sound he can never hear until everything falls apart, until Malik is gone or lost or never found and he is forced to wonder how he lived a life so unstable, so incomplete, and it _hurts_.

\---

They are two who cannot do small things, who cannot stand by when there is a battle to fight, who cannot keep to their own business. They bleed so many lives away, fall to swords or bombs or poison, at each other’s hands and not. So many violent deaths, so many violent ends, and so many times it is for a cause greater than themselves and this is _fine_.

But they are only men as well, and sometimes-

\---

He curls a hand around the armrest of his chair, and almost feels the curve of the Apple beneath his palm, but it’s already hidden away somewhere safe and he no longer needs to worry about it. There isn’t always an Apple, it isn’t always to blame for the way he is driven to fight and correct and guide, but the fallout is the same no matter where he is.

He is so tired.

He dies old, sometimes, but usually alone, usually just like this.

And always his last thoughts are about peace. Peace for men with bloody hands and aching scars and violence in their bones.

\---

And sometimes.

\---

“Hammurabi,” an annoyingly familiar voice demands, _has_ been demanding, for three months, and Malik scowls down at his ledger.

“No. A thousand times this past _week_ , no, and if you had a single-” Malik starts scathingly, looking up- and stops cold. There is a pair of eyes just barely peering over the top of the desk, wide and startled, small fingers gripping tightly. He flails mentally for a moment, biting back hard on the rest of the sentence, eyes equally wide, before he looks further up, into oddly smug hazel eyes.

The momentum he’d lost is abruptly found again, and Malik glares. “You use a _child_ as a shield, now?” he asks sharply, modulating his tone into something nowhere near as vicious, in deference to the knowledge that homicidal intent is not the best thing to expose young children to. Altaïr, being Altaïr, merely raises an eyebrow, which Malik promptly translates as, _Yes. Yes, I am shamelessly abusing your fondness for children in order to avoid handling your assault like a man. I am also a coward and hold you in the highest regard and acknowledge that I am a worthless excuse for a human being and do not understand why I believe I deserve to remain in your presence like this._

He believes it only his due if Altaïr refuses to answer questions with his _words_.

“Can I help you with anything?” he tries again, once the silence carries on a beat too long, forcing himself into the milder and bland tones customer service typically required, and focusing on the child. He practically _feels_ himself soften, and preventing his teeth from grinding becomes much easier.

“Desmond wanted to ask you something,” Altaïr says, still somewhere between smug and amused, nudging the child with a knee. Desmond stiffens against the encouragement, making no move one way or the other, and Malik restrains a sigh. Then he stands up and circles the desk, painfully aware of how difficult it had been to get Kadar to talk to a strange adult without an intimidating structure in the way.

He blatantly ignores the surprised and wary look Altaïr gives him, kneeling down when Desmond moves half-behind Altaïr’s leg. “Hn,” he says, clicking his tongue off the roof of his mouth as he makes a show of looking the boy over, scrambling for the skills he’d learned mostly in self-defense back when Kadar was this age. “Let me guess. You like magic, yes? Flying.”

Desmond freezes for a moment, looking cautiously from Malik to Altaïr for guidance. Altaïr is utterly useless, which Malik sympathizes with, and simply stares back at him expectantly. The boy takes a deep breath, tightens his grip, nodding quickly.

“Harry Potter, then,” Malik says decisively, nodding back. “What book are you on? And perhaps dragons.”

Desmond hesitates again, before slowly slipping partway out of hiding. Malik counts it as a victory. “I don’t like dragons,” he says, hesitantly, and Malik waves it away.

“Ach. That is only because you have not yet read anything good about them. I can fix that, yes? Come along.”

He stands and doesn’t offer his hand, even if he does have to remind himself to be _still_ as his fingers automatically twitch in that direction. This is not Kadar, after all. Desmond shifts closer to Altaïr again, looking up, but Altaïr is too busy staring at Malik like he’s grown a second head. Malik simply stares back at him, not glaring with sheer force of will, and makes a sharp motion with his hands. “Well?” he says, and turns on his heel, walking away. “The children’s section, if you would. Our Harry Potter goes quickly.”

Those are apparently the magic words, because Desmond is promptly tearing past him and Malik doesn’t even call out a reminder not to run in the library. Altaïr falls into step beside him, his silence brooding, smugness lost and this is the way it _should_ be, Malik knows. “I ask for three months and you refuse me each time, but I bring along a child who does not even speak and you are coming out from behind your desk to help,” he complains, and Malik, who is not a generous man by nature, doesn’t bother describing his words as anything but whining.

“Your brother is far less annoying,” he says, and then pauses. “…I was not even aware you had brother.” He assumes the boy is Altaïr’s _sibling_ , at least. The man is certainly doesn’t seem old enough to have a son Desmond’s age, though it wasn’t impossible.

Altaïr glances sidelong at him, arms crossed. “Three. All younger.”

“Tch,” Malik clicks against his surprise. “Poor kids.”

“Um,” Desmond is back, now half-hidden behind shelves and interrupting Altaïr’s glare before it can truly form. “Where-“

“Too high for you,” Malik says, smoothly sliding away from the man at his side. “Your brother should have had no trouble spotting them, however, unless he is also blind. I will get them for you.”

Desmond doesn’t look like he’s sure how to respond to that, but Malik wasn’t expecting him to. “I’m, uh. I’m on three?”

“Hmm, of course.” And when he goes to pull down the appropriate book, along with the others he thought Desmond might like, Altaïr doesn’t stop staring.

“You have Hammurabi,” he says, eventually, when Malik is handing the books over and Desmond is slinking off for a safe place to inspect them. “Unless they are also too high for me to find.” Like he doesn’t realize he could have gone to any bookstore or any other library in the last three months and found what he wanted there just as easily – easier, in fact, without Malik there to stonewall him. Maybe he is just stubborn. Malik shrugs. As stubborn as Altaïr might be, Malik knows that he is more so.

“Perhaps, but you are not a man who appears to need more Hammurabi in his life. So, for you, no. We do not.”

They are actually hidden behind the help desk, and Malik had used both his reputation as a fantastic librarian and also the fact the rest of the staff were mildly afraid of him to get them taken out of regular circulation, available on request only and never to rude men with odd hazel eyes and faint, familiar accents.

Let it never be said that Malik was not thorough in his revenge.

Malik glances over Altaïr once, similar to the way he had his brother, and nods shortly, grinning with far too many teeth. “I will find you Gandhi,” he offers, graciously, and Altaïr’s immediate look of disgust is innately _satisfying_.   

\---

(It is never a matter of _if_ things will go wrong, but when, and how well they will weather it.)

(But sometimes - just sometimes - the dice fall true and things turn out just right, and they are born in the lull between disasters and chaos rather than directly in the middle of it, and they find each other before either can slip toward destruction and shadows, and for awhile - for one life, maybe, if they are _so lucky_ \- things are delicate and balanced and _happy_ , and it is almost like perfection.)


End file.
